Theatre – Page 63 – ComedyNews.Org :: Comedy News Organization

Anarchy at the ice rink: when comedy, theatre and nonsense collide

October 11, 2017TheGuardian

Tony Law is going where no comic has gone before: staging a play about global warming – on ice. Our writer gets his skates on and crashes into a chaotic rehearsal

You might not guess it from looking at this bunch of brightly dressed characters, skating haphazardly around Alexandra Palace ice rink in London with an armchair in tow, but in just a few days they will attempt to put on what is surely a theatrical first: a two-hour comedy stage show on ice. About global warming. And Stalin.

“I don’t know what will happen, but it will 100% be entertaining,” says Adam Larter, the founding member of Weirdos Comedy Club, who wrote Tony Law and Friends in the Battle for Icetopia. That seems a safe bet: the project is a collaboration between Law – a cult figure on the alternative comedy circuit – and Weirdos, both of whom have form when it comes to anarchic, seat-of-your-pants live comedy. The former embarks on wild flights of time-travelling fantasy during his live shows, the latter built a cult audience through their annual charity pantos, which have tackled everything from feminist mermaids to war epics revolving around KFC’s Colonel Sanders.

One character is a combination of Phil Collins and Donald Trump, captured in foam form

Tim Minchin: ‘The world feels a bit post-jokes’

October 8, 2017TheGuardian

The comedian-composer on his children’s book, Australia’s same-sex marriage vote and why he’s glad to be leaving Hollywood

Australian composer and comedian Tim Minchin, 42, was born in Northampton but raised in his parents’ native Perth. After an award-winning comedy career, he wrote the music and lyrics for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s global hit musical Matilda, followed by the stage musical adaptation of Groundhog Day. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Sarah, a social worker, and their two children.

Tell us about your new children’s book, When I Grow Up, which is based on the lyrics of the song from Matilda.
It’s awesome – I didn’t even have to do anything [laughs]. That’s the incredible thing about Matilda, it keeps manifesting itself in different ways. It’s profoundly gratifying to have something else beautiful put into the world that was sparked by something you wrote eight years ago.

In a global world, nationalism is a fantasy and it’s poison. It used to be appropriate but it’s not any more

Angels and demons: the unmissable theatre, comedy and dance of autumn 2017

September 12, 2017TheGuardian

Hamilton hits London, Bryan Cranston’s news anchor goes berserk, Wayne McGregor turns his DNA into dance, Mae Martin revisits her teen addictions and Toyah Willcox is a time-travelling queen

Sara Pascoe: how I overcame my Jane Austen prejudice

September 1, 2017TheGuardian

Austen’s women have the same rights as children; her ‘romantic’ match-making smacks of desperation. So how did the standup see the funny side of Pride and Prejudice for her new stage adaptation?

“Why does no one talk about how funny Jane Austen is?” I ask my friend Katie. We’d done English literature for three years at Sussex University – how was I only discovering these perceptive comedies a decade later?

“It’s all anyone ever says!” Katie is annoyed with me. “I tried to tell you how great she was but you insisted you’d never read any 19th-century novels.” She’s right. I got through my entire degree avoiding anything from the 19th century. I didn’t care if the steam train ended up in the workhouse, or the bonnet ran out of gruel. Regency literature was too coal-y for me, too long-winded and describey. I preferred modern books where you had to read other books explaining what the first book meant to know what happened.

How could there be any romance, any love, when females were wedding-night virgins, dependants with little respect?

Lydia Towsey: how I discovered the Venus in me

August 30, 2017TheGuardian

From Botticelli to glossy magazines, women have been idealised and misrepresented for centuries. Performance poet Lydia Towsey reveals how her own near-fatal eating disorder set her on a path to explore new ways of looking at female bodies

Botticelli’s painting of the Birth of Venus was the first female nude painted and exhibited life size, and in many ways the medieval blueprint for every covergirl to come. It was about the birth of beauty, sexuality and glamour. But what would happen if, instead of washing up on an ancient Cypriot beach on her magnificent scallop shell, the Roman goddess were to arrive naked and vulnerable on a UK beach in the 21st century? This question is the starting point for my show, The Venus Papers.

It’s about lots of things – a theatrical performance combining poetry, humour, art, movement and music, in which I introduce Venus to my world. She encounters customs officers, tabloid newspapers, the male gaze, bars, Primark, life modelling, the perils of breastfeeding in public and something I’ve previously struggled to talk about in my work – the eating disorder I had for approximately seven years.

Edinburgh’s double comedy winners mix humour with darker takes on life

August 26, 2017TheGuardian

Shows about relationship breakdown and homophobia pick up a prize – or two – for John Robins and Hannah Gadsby

The longest ever shortlist. The first ever joint winners. And clearly, the most indecisive judging panel ever.

It was indeed, as the publicity would have it, an “unprecedented” year for the Edinburgh comedy awards. But, if there’s a worry that the currency of these awards is being devalued, there can be no real complaints about this year’s champs: probably the two most audacious stand-up shows on the fringe, and certainly among the funniest.

Spider-Man’s dad, Ruby Wax and Labour v Tory standup: Edinburgh festival 2017 – in pictures

August 19, 2017TheGuardian

The Edinburgh festival 2017 is still going strong with unlikely film stars, black-history monologues and toddler comedy sidekicks – here’s a selection of the latest shows photographed by Murdo MacLeod

Spider-Man’s dad, Ruby Wax and Labour v Tory standup: Edinburgh festival 2017 – in pictures

August 19, 2017TheGuardian

The Edinburgh festival 2017 is still going strong with unlikely film stars, black-history monologues and toddler comedy sidekicks – here’s a selection of the latest shows photographed by Murdo MacLeod

Jon Pointing review – a cringeworthy new comic monster is unleashed

August 17, 2017TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
Pointing’s egocentric creep Cayden Hunter and his spoof acting masterclass is mesmerisingly ghastly and deliciously daft

Towards the end of last summer’s Edinburgh festival, tongues started wagging about Jon Pointing’s below-the-radar work-in-progress show in a graveyard shift on the free fringe. His spoof acting masterclass is back this year, developed to full length, transferred to the Pleasance Courtyard, and justifying the hype. Pointing masquerades as theatre guru Cayden Hunter – touchy-feely but thin-skinned, colossal of ego and microscopic in self-knowledge. He is the David Brent of the trust exercise and the improv game. Like Brent, Hunter at his best is so convincing you’d think his creator must be intimately familiar with his own inner prat. Or that, forced into contact with prats, he’s studied them (and his revenge on them) in minute detail.

In love with himself and patronising his audience, Hunter channels more bullshit than the sluice gates at a dairy farm. “There’s no maps for the kind of roads we’re travelling down,” he purrs. He is, in short, a creep – and yet (to Pointing’s credit) the text isn’t that improbable. Tweak the caricature down a notch, and this acting class – with its talk of risk and danger, its fetishising of “the truth”, poorly defined – is but an ace away from credible reality.

An Indiana Jones spoof and the destruction of Palmyra – the six best shows at Edinburgh fringe 2017

August 15, 2017TheGuardian

Six of the best from Edinburgh including Mat Ewins’ barrage of one-liners, a German teacher placement at a secondary school and a transgender journey

Pleasance Courtyard
Building on the success of her 2016 show about sexism in comedy, the no-nonsense Welshwoman delivers a lean and effective set about a year spent volunteering with vulnerable kids. It doesn’t sound funny, but it really is, thanks to her brusque wit and a high quotient of thoughtful, self-lacerating jokes. BL

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